Walking-Stick Papers eBook

II

ON GOING A JOURNEY

One of the pleasantest things in the world is “going
a journey”—­but few know it now.
It isn’t every one that can go a journey.
No doubt one that owns an automobile cannot go.
The spirit of the age has got him fast. Begoggled
and with awful squawks, feverish, exultant, ignorant,
he is condemned to hoot over the earth. Thus
the wealthy know nothing of journeys, for they must
own motors. Vain people and envious people and
proud people cannot go, because the wealthy do not.
Silly people do not know enough to go. The lazy
cannot, because of their laziness. The busy
hang themselves with business. The halt nor
the aged, alas! cannot go. In fine, only such
as are whole anywise and pure in heart can go a journey,
and they are the blessed.

“We arrive at places now, but we” (most
of us) “travel no more.” The way
a journey is gone, to come to the point, is walking.
Asking many folks’ pardon, to tear through
the air in an open car, deafened, hilariously muddled
by the rush and roar of wind, is to drive observation
from the mind: it is to be, in a manner, complacently,
intellectually unconscious; is to drink an enjoyment
akin to that of the shooters of the chute, or that
got on the very latest of this sort of engine of human
amusement called the “Hully-Gee-Whizz,”
a pleasure of the ignorant, metaphorically, a kind
of innocents’ rot-gut whiskey. The way
a journey is gone, which is walking, is a wine, a mellow
claret, stimulating to observation, to thought, to
speculation, to the flow of talk, gradually, decently
warming the blood. Rightly taken (which manner
this paper attempts to set forth), walking is among
the pleasures of the mind. It is a call-boy
to wit, a hand-maiden to cultivation. Sufficiently
indulged in, it will make a man educated, a wit, a
poet, an ironist, a philosopher, a gentleman, a better
Christian (not to dwell upon improving his digestion
and prolonging his life). And, too, like true
Shandyism “it opens the heart and the lungs.”
Whoso hath ears, let him hear! Once and for all,
if the mad world did but know it, the best, the most
exquisite automobile is a walking-stick; and one of
the finest things in life is going a journey with
it.

No one, though (this is the first article to be observed),
should ever go a journey with any other than him with
whom one walks arm in arm, in the evening, the twilight,
and, talking (let us suppose) of men’s given
names, agrees that if either should have a son he shall
be named after the other. Walking in the gathering
dusk, two and two, since the world began, there have
always been young men who have time to one another
plighted their troth. If one is not still one
of these, then, in the sense here used, journeys are
over for him. What is left to him of life he
may enjoy, but not journeys. Mention should be
made in passing that some have been found so ignorant
of the nature of journeys as to suppose that they
might be taken in company with members, or a member,
of the other sex. Now, one who writes of journeys
would cheerfully be burned at the stake before he
would knowingly underestimate women. But it
must be confessed that it is another season in the
life of man that they fill.